The old bus cruises out of Shanghai with a low hum. If it attempts to accelerate, its belly will groan, and the speeding wheels will slow down again. So the engine, as if wading through molasses, patiently hauls its giant metal jacket and the passengers within. Under the shadows of the dim lamps flanking the road, the southern summer heat holds everything still. Inside the bus, the windows are open; hair flies backwards, exposing angelic, sleeping faces, caressed by the artificial breeze manufactured from a moving vehicle.
In the third row, two women lean their heads into each other. A few hours earlier, they shared the same bag of makeup: mascara, eye shadow, blush, lipstick, and put them on for each other in the same ugly style, which, somehow, makes them look more different. Under layers of cosmetic concealment, they can’t be more than twenty years old. A mother, sitting two rows behind them, looks a little older, though twenty-five at most, her lap a pillow for a boy of four or five. Three rows farther back, on the other side of the bus, a middle-aged couple, even while sleeping, wear a tight knot between their brows, dreaming the same disquieted dream. A few men spread out toward the back of the bus. They look alike in their white cotton tank tops, lean and malnourished, their hands young but rough from carrying bricks, mixing concrete, scaling up and down steel panels and poles with no safety net underneath. The dashboard clock reads 23:31 in red, insistent numbers. Behind the windshield sits a piece of cardboard with the name of the destination, a town that does not welcome the resting hearts on this bus or anyone else. Yet they are being carried toward the lifeless place, toward a new, old day.
Two young men sitting at either end of the back row are the only ones awake besides the bus driver, who, perhaps, only has half of his brain conscious, like a sleeping whale. The older one tilts his head over the backrest; from afar, he looks like he could be dreaming, too, but up close, passing headlights flash across his glassy pupils in the rhythm of a waltz—vroom, whoosh, rest, vroom, whoosh, rest. His light blue polo shirt has been sweated through and washed too many times, its color fading into a perennially dirty gray, the rim of its sagging collar growing fuzzy. On his left chest, a triangle of three black strokes evokes the trademarked logo of a German sports brand. He spent what he could live on for a week on this shirt when he arrived in Shanghai a year ago, and wore it only when he looked for new jobs, oblivious to the spelling under the proud, recognizable logo: A-D-I-D-O-S. He could read the individual letters but didn’t know how to pronounce them together. He called it ah-dee, which he found strange at first, as if speaking a foreign language; but when he returned to his hometown during Spring Festival, the foreign word rolled off his tongue in a store, and the young saleswoman looked at him like he had knowledge, taste and all that came with those things. Neither of them knew ah-dee was what city people called the German brand, too, nor did they know that they were buying and selling the brand’s cheap knockoffs. Although his favorite shirt has not worked in his favor in the past few months, he wears it tonight nonetheless. Staring at the ceiling, he wishes that some kind of god could bless the night ahead, but having grown up without a religion, no prayer comes to mind.
The younger one, at the opposite end of the back row, looks out the window. Earphones in, he clutches onto his phone, switching songs now and then. Everything on his body is brand new—a new tacky black suit, fitting too loosely over his bony build, a new pair of black fake leather shoes, a new white dress shirt, unbuttoned almost to his belly button, and a new face, one that hasn’t been altered by all that is to befall him in this lifetime. His eyes, unblinking, shimmer with fearless anger and uncontrollable impulse. Even as he looks out at nothing on the highway, these feelings climb up his spine and arise on his face, surprising himself. At nineteen, he hasn’t expected living to be this difficult. He has heard about it, of course, from his parents who sought work in big cities and saw him once a year during Spring Festival, from older friends who left their village before he did, from guys he met in his temporary housing on the outskirts of Shanghai, but those were other people’s misfortunes, and he was unprepared when it was his turn. If there were a god it’d be the god of unfairness, he thinks, playing roulette with poor bastards like him. To drown his thoughts out, he cranks up the volume, the syrupy songs made by no-name Internet songwriters now audible in the tranquil interior of the bus. He forces his eyes to close, as if persuading himself to rest for the long night ahead. Soon enough, he opens them, gazing, again, into the dark void.
◆
“Wake up. Kunshan is here,” the bus driver announces, as if they have not driven into the town, but the town has appeared in front of them.
As the other passengers slowly move their limbs in a waking dream, the two young men in the back row zip down the aisle and jump out.
The younger one takes out a wrinkled pack of cigarettes from the messenger bag he wears uncomfortably across his body, the strap cutting right into the side of his neck. He flips the top open and taps on the cigarettes—one, two, three.
“Qiang-brother,” he says softly, extending the pack to the older one.
After Qiang pulls out a cigarette, he does, too. He lights it for Qiang, then his own. Each man takes a drag with deliberation, holds it in, and in, lost in the bliss of cheap nicotine, until a long, foggy breath escapes them. Smoking is one of the few things that make them happy: the feeling of holding a solid thing between your fingers, the freedom to administer the dose of pleasure, the sense of being in control when they have control over almost nothing.
Meandering their way out of the bus station, they pass a hive of food vendors and late-night eaters on plastic stools munching on meat skewers, spicy soups, sweet sticky rice, savory pancake wraps with sausage. The younger man stops walking without meaning to. He loves street food carts, though he wonders if it’s their cheap price that makes it more appealing. A few meters ahead, Qiang is looking at his young friend drooling over the food they can’t afford.
“Wen-zi,” he summons. “Let’s go.”
Wen turns to see Qiang waving. Wen has known this man, nine years his senior, for less than forty-eight hours, but he trusts Qiang like an older brother he never had. They met yesterday in a hotel lobby in Shanghai where both were supposed to meet the boss of a security company. Other than the ten other guys who also paid two-thousand yuan to a scammer who claimed that he was recruiting security guards—with room and board—for the company, not even the shadow of the boss was seen on the hotel premises. They waited for hours, huddling in a corner of the lobby and taking turns to smoke outside, as if as long as they remained in place, some sort of lifeline would materialize. The others started leaving one by one after the cigarettes were depleted. By the end of the day, Qiang and Wen were the only two left; neither had a place to go. They spent the night on two adjacent park benches and came up with a plan. The next day, they spent the last of their cash on a pack of cigarettes and two bus tickets to Kunshan. Scanning the spellbinding spread of food within arm’s reach, Wen tells himself that he will find ways to feed himself by the time the sun comes out.
Wen catches up to Qiang and they keep walking, passing a group of school boys in uniforms, down the street and around the corner, the sound of peddling and laughing growing faint behind as the streets get darker and narrower before them. When Qiang turns right at the intersection, Wen follows. Trees line this new street, their branches sprawling over the sidewalk and reaching to meet in the center; lush leaves loom over the two men and cars parked against the curb. Qiang and Wen lighten their footsteps as if trespassing. They roam in the hesitant pace of people not certain of where they are going. Both of them wait for the other to say something, perhaps something that would stop the other from doing what they plan to do. But they walk on in silence. If they were more perceptive men, they would have understood the wavering in the other’s reticence. And that, although it seems that fate, having won at every turn of events, has brought them to this town that they know nothing about but will remember for the rest of their lives, they still have a choice. The sky will be light in a few hours and somewhere in this factory town there will be bosses looking for workers like them. But in this moment, none of that occurs to them. Choice belongs to other people; they do what they have to and that is hard enough.
Qiang stops, elbowing Wen in his side, gesturing him to look. Wen sees the broken window of a black sedan next to them. In the split second that Qiang is pondering what to do, Wen has thrust himself against the car and lowered his upper body into the open window. He rummages through every compartment, opening and not bothering to close them. Some crumpled receipts, a hair clip, and a woman’s comb.
“Anything?” Qiang whispers, standing next to Wen’s ass that’s sticking out of the car.
“Nothing,” Wen says. “Just shit. Like a comb and shit.”
“What kind of comb?” Qiang thinks of his wife, whose long hair was the first thing he loved about her. She cut it short, five months ago, when she found out that she was with child, saying that long hair absorbs nutrition that should go to the baby. She looked elated on his phone screen, and he was happy, too, but when they hung up, he found himself thinking that he didn’t like her short hair so much. It made her face look flat and chubby. They fucked almost every day when he was home for Spring Festival. He waited all year for that. Having kids was the last thing on his mind and now he’s about to have one and penniless. His wife said he would be a good father, so he will. After the baby’s birth, he will ask her to grow her hair long again.
Wen backs out of the broken window, holding out a small, wooden comb. “You want it?”
Qiang takes it, running his fingers over the top of the comb, feeling the carved pattern like a blind man reading a Braille book. The wood feels solid and warm from fermenting inside the glove compartment. Satisfied, he puts it into his pocket.
Both of them soon discover, once they start walking again, that the windows of the next car and the next and the next are all broken into. Wen pokes around obligatorily in every car, a treasure hunt yielding only trash—soiled napkins, disposable utensils, a single sock. Frustrated, he kicks the tire of a car and the resistance from the rubber reverberates through him like a blow in the stomach, awaking the anger that he has managed to quiet since getting off the bus. His parents always say that he’s good for nothing. But what do they know about him? They didn’t raise him. Though having sent money to Grandma every month, they think they did. Only Grandma liked his company, even when he failed his high school entrance exam, even when he spent all night in the Internet cafe and came home in the morning demanding a bowl of hot congee, even when he said to her things he wish he didn’t. But Grandma is dead now, and he is to become a man of his own.
“Fuck this place…” Wen curses loudly.
Before his rant goes further, Qiang tapes his palm over Wen’s mouth. Across the street, a flashlight dances behind the windshield of a car like it’s chasing a mouse. Qiang and Wen confirm their next move with a look at the other and start moving toward the light. They circle around and disappear into some waist-high bushes. Through the space between the shrubs, they identify the flashlight’s operator—a man dressed in all black, with a black face mask and a black backpack strapped over his chest. Like a burglar in Hong Kong gangster movies, Wen thinks, before realizing that the man is, no doubt, a burglar.
Staying behind the bushes, Qiang and Wen follow him to the next car. The burglar backs away from the car window and holds something up in one hand while his other elbow swings back as if drawing a bow.
“It’s a slingshot,” Qiang whispers to Wen.
When he was a boy, Qiang loved playing with slingshots. He and his friends made them out of sturdy branches foraged in the woods, aimed at things they weren’t supposed to, and launched pebbles, chicken bones, pits of peaches and plums. A decade later during Wen’s childhood, he barely knew what a slingshot was; playing with friends meant sitting together and devoting full attention to their devices.
The projectile makes a subdued cracking sound when it hits the glass. The man steps in, gives the window a gentle knock with the slingshot and—Wen can’t believe his eyes—the window blossoms into shards, hitting the ground like a shimmering waterfall, gathering a pool of moonlight by the tire. While Wen is mesmerized, Qiang remembers his unborn child. He pulls out a knife.
The man turns on the flashlight again and leans into the car window, his butt sticking out of the car, like he is positioning himself to be violated from behind. Then he is.
Three things happen at the same time: two pairs of strong hands grip his arms, a cold and sharp object pushes against his back, and he hears a harmony of two masculine voices in a low but menacing register, don’t move.
◆
Behind the bushes, Qiang keeps his knife at the burglar’s neck, his other hand tightly clenching the man’s wrists together behind his back.
The man whimpers and says, his vowels trembling, “Big brother, that hurts.”
“Shut up.” But Qiang loosens his grip. “Wen-zi, what you got there?”
Wen, squatting, is picking through the man’s backpack. A few dead cell phones, an iPod, and an excess of small bills. Wen shoves the electronics into his messenger bag. Clamping the flashlight between his lips, he counts the money. The texture of cash makes his heart flutter, his fingers moving faster than he could count.
“Five, six, seven…seven, eight,” Wen utters under his breath. “Twenty-five…Thirty…”
Qiang and the burglar watch Wen’s fingers, finally, slow down.
“Forty…Forty-two.” Wen jumps up. “Motherfucker! Only forty-two kuai.”
But Qiang already knew that from the look of those bills, light green and purple, none of them pink.
Wen smacks the man’s head with the crinkly stack. “You’re a shit burglar, I’ll say.”
“Quit babbling,” Qiang scolds Wen. “Search him.”
Wen stuffs half of the cash into Qiang’s pocket, half in his own, and starts fishing in the man’s pockets.
This really tickles, the man thinks, and, even with a knife at his neck, he can’t seem to stop the giggles. He tries, and it sounds like he is choking, which makes Qiang move the knife a hair off his neck. Wen isn’t expecting a jackpot or anything but he is nevertheless satisfied with his finding—a working phone, some change, and an ID card. The man’s name is Song An.
“Hey, we’re the same age!” Wen exclaims. “Born in the same month, even.”
Qiang unhooks Song An’s mask: the man he is holding against his body is just a boy, his face smooth and pimply, its expressive muscles not yet mastering the art of concealing his emotions. The boy looks terrified.
“How old are you?” Qiang knows the answer but he asks anyway.
“Nineteen,” Song An says. If they didn’t have his ID, he would have said that he was twenty-two; he told people he was nineteen when he turned sixteen. Eyeing the phone in Wen’s hand, he swallows and says, “That’s…big brother, that’s my phone.”
With a few extra words, his Northeastern accent announces his provenance, somewhere far, frigid, and destitute.
Qiang looks at the two nineteen-year-olds in front of him. How is one different from the other?
“Forget it, Wen-zi,” Qiang says. “Just give his phone back.”
“Forget it? Qiang-brother, we’re trying to rob him here!” Realizing he has spoken too loudly, Wen lowers his voice. “If we count the change, we have only a little over fifty kuai. Those ancient dead phones aren’t worth shit. Now you want to give his phone back?”
“There’s the one with the half-bitten apple on it, did you see? I’ve seen it in a big store,” Song An stumbles over his words in exasperation. “It’s worth money!”
The hint of pride interpolated in his sincerity makes Wen laugh. Even on the brink of his throat being slit, Song An seems genuinely concerned if his robbers could get good money for their spoils.
“You ground beetle! It’s just an old-ass Apple!” Wen says, putting Song An’s phone in his pocket.
Giving up on his phone, Song An tries the next thing he might be able to salvage. “Can I have my ID? I need it for work. I beg you, big brother.”
“Take a photo,” Qiang commands.
Wen points his phone at Qiang and Song An. At the camera flash, Qiang growls, “Fucking idiot! Take a photo of his ID!”
Wen obeys, ashamed of his lack of professionalism. The fake camera shutter clicks. Qiang snatches the ID from Wen and hands it to Song An.
“If you say anything to anyone, we’ll fuck you up,” Qiang delivers this threat with as much conviction as he can muster. When his son reaches nineteen, Qiang will seldom get as close to him as he does to Song An in this moment, the boy’s body locked in his arms. On the rare occasion that Qiang will touch his son, he will establish not the presence of fear but only a sense of protection.
Qiang pushes Song An away and the boy lands on his butt. Wen throws his empty backpack at him.
“Thank you, big brother” Song An repeats it as if chanting a mantra. “Thank you! Thank you.”
◆
With fifty yuan between them, Wen walks with his nose pointing up at the moon. He is hungry, but nothing is open at this hour so he might as well let his belly sing with pride. The whole town has gone to sleep, but both Qiang and Wen know that their night has only just begun. One of them is starting to get off on this business of jumping and scaring people, and the other carries on because they have to. What they took from Song An isn’t even enough to stuff the gaps between their teeth, Qiang thinks, and they need more. Much more.
“That wasn’t too bad, was it? We can really do this, Qiang-brother.” Wen says as they stroll down a wider avenue. “That dickhead was scared shitless. Wouldn’t dare to let out a fart even if you asked him to.”
“We got lucky. That’s all,” Qiang says.
“Lucky? We won’t get shit for those dead phones. Maybe the Apple will be worth something.”
A bright glare swims in and out of Wen’s peripheral vision. He glances down, “Yo, Qiang-brother, you still showing off that knife? Put it away already.”
“Right,” Qiang puts the army green sheath over the short dagger and returns it to his pocket. He rubs it nervously as they keep walking.
“It’s a cool knife though,” adds Wen.
Qiang doesn’t respond. He is thinking about how Song An’s angular shoulder blades pressed into his chest and how hard he will have to try to forget the boy’s pimply face. And how he has become a person who holds a knife at a boy’s throat and if he is that person at all, and if he can be that person, himself, and a good person all at the same time? He peeks at Wen, and wonders if he has made a mistake agreeing to come on this field trip with his new friend, if he could have said different things so they would end up in a different place.
Wen looks around for their next target. He wants a big fish, not just some second-rate petty thief like Song An, who has even worse luck than himself, being so far from his hometown. Wen would have befriended him if they weren’t in the shoes they are in tonight, and he would have asked Song An what Northeastern snow is like, if it really piles up to the knees and covered everything in white like he has seen on TV. He imagines his southern hometown cloaked in powder snow and while his brain thinks of cold, his heart feels warm. He has nothing to go back to, but he still, reluctantly, misses the place he calls home. He looks up at the dark windows of a tall apartment building, picturing all his big fishes sleeping in their AC-cooled air and silky sheets, secure from what he is capable of. He knows Qiang doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He doesn’t, either; they are only after money, that’s what they agreed on. But I’ll do whatever it takes, Wen thinks, not completely understanding what that entails.
Somewhere behind Qiang and Wen, emerging from the quietness, is the sound of someone running toward them. They turn around and see the dark outline of a person growing larger by the second. When the silhouette gets close enough, they recognize it—it’s Song An.
“Big brothers!” Song An slows down, panting.
Wen has posed himself in a kung-fu stance with Bruce Lee hands and Qiang’s knife is out again—a battle formation that stops Song An three meters away.
Between short breaths, Song An says, “Big brother! Can I come with you?”
◆
When Song An was left alone in those sidewalk bushes, all his possessions taken, for a minute, he was paralyzed with the burden of his human agency. What was he to do? Did he have to go on with this hopeless life? What was next if he simply could not go on anymore? He started working in a shoe factory in Zhejiang at seventeen. A year into the job, like everyone else, he started smuggling imperfect export rejects out of the factory and sold them to local stores, but as luck had it, he was the only one caught, fired, and blacklisted. But he couldn’t go home; nothing but rice farming awaited him. He would lose face, though no one but he himself cared. For a boy who never possessed much, Song An possessed a toxic amount of pride. He made his way to Kunshan, another factory town in the neighboring province. For days he couldn’t find a gig. He was out of money for the cheapest hostel on the edge of town. All he wanted was a job with room and board. It was never his plan to break car windows, but none of his plans had panned out so perhaps planning was not his forte. If he did have to be a criminal, even just for one night, he had a hunch that he could trust those two guys. Despite putting him in this to be or not to be conundrum, they were kinder to him than most people he had met in his life.
The three of them now march in a line. If someone stands at the other end of this long avenue, it looks like that they are slowly rising above the horizon, like sea turtles coming up to the surface of the ocean for air.
“What’s snow like in the Northeast? Does it really go up to your knees?” Wen asks.
“Of course! We have so much snow in the winter it’s endless, and we have endless snowball fights, too. ” Song An talks as if he was personally responsible for all the snow in the world.
“Who taught you to break car windows with a slingshot?” Qiang asks.
“This?” Song An pulls the slingshot out of his backpack.
“Why didn’t I take his slingshot!” Wen slaps his thigh. “We could be breaking windows right now!” Wen will blame himself in every unfortunate situation for decades to come, for not being intelligent enough, educated enough, hardworking enough, until he will witness his own child going through the same cycle and finally hear the question that has been festering inside him: is the world set up for them to fail?
Song An says that he overheard a conversation in a restaurant two days ago. “Two big guys drank so much beer and one kept bragging about how he used to break car windows with slingshots. Tonight was my first try!”
“Why did you become a thief?” Qiang asks, temporarily forgetting that he himself is none other.
Song An enumerates his series of misfortunes. “Big brothers, I don’t want to be a thief,” he says in conclusion.
“Neither do we!” Wen declares allegiance, which emboldens Song An. He steps in front of Wen and Qiang to face them, “Why are you guys doing it then?”
As Wen recounts the events of yesterday, the heat of that anger, again, flushes through him. “That motherfucker! I hope his whole family fucking drops dead!”
“Why don’t you shout a little louder so the cops can hear you, too?” Qiang mutters with a quiet authority.
Wen, hushed, kicks every tree he passes. Thump, thump, thump. He likes the pain in his foot, of which the cause is clear, the length predictable. Thump.
“Give Song An’s stuff back to him,” Qiang says.
“Just give it all back? That leaves us with…”
“We are all brothers now. How can we steal from our brother?”
“Fine. Brothers,” Wen says, kicking another tree.
Wen empties his bag into Song An’s backpack.
“Thank you, big brother!” Song An grins at Qiang, then at Wen. “When we get more money, I’m okay any way you guys want to split.”
Wen puts his bag back on, the lightness of it weighing him down.
“But why didn’t you stay in Shanghai and mug people there? Shanghai people must be so rich!” Song An asks.
“Too many cops there,” says Qiang.
“Qiang-brother has a wife back home and a kid on the way. If he got in, they’d probably starve,” Wen explains. “I heard that petty crimes are common in Kunshan. It’s so close to Shanghai so we took the night bus here.”
“If someone had told me that one day I would be mugging people on the street, I would have stayed in the army in Xinjiang,” Qiang says. What he really wants to say is that he just doesn’t know what else he can possibly do but he isn’t going to sound weak in front of these boys. The truth is he wouldn’t have been able to stay in the army even if he wanted to. One was either getting promoted to be an officer, an opportunity unavailable to a mediocre soldier like him, or forced to return to civil society, having lost years of what could have been work experience. After the army, he worked with a construction company until the owner disappeared, owing months of the workers’ salary. He moved home, then, but the small town economy did not need another hand. He finally ventured out to Shanghai, waiting every morning at the popular pick-up spot as a day laborer while looking for a long-term job. Once on top of a half-finished skyscraper, Qiang got a glimpse of the glistening metropolis which, he thought, surely was big enough to have a place for him.
“Qiang brother! You were in the army? That’s badass. Why didn’t you tell me before!” Wen pats Qiang on the back. “I always wanted to be in the army, but failed the physical exam twice.”
“Army was good times,” Qiang lies. His time as a soldier still make up his nightmares, all the training, hazing, and political education, which he does not tell Wen and Song An. Instead, he paints an idyllic picture—being fed on a fixed schedule day in and day out while doing cool, manly things. He shows the boys on his knife the etching of his old regiment’s number, which they stroke gently, longing.
◆
It’s past three in the morning. For twenty minutes Qiang and Song An have been sitting on the curb while, in front of them, Wen leans on a telephone pole, playing his role as the surveyor. Across the street, there is a hubbub of youngsters. When Wen suggested that they break into more cars, Song An said that he had gone around town all night and people don’t leave valuables in their cars—if they wanted to rob people, there was one place in town where some would hang at this hour. They are looking at them now: young people coming and going around two Internet cafes on the eastern edge of town. Between them nestles a small 24-hour shop, selling everything the cafe-goers subsist on—drinks, snacks and cigarettes. The three of them can jump anyone, but they wait patiently. If an appropriate candidate leaves the scene alone, they will follow.
Wen knows exactly who is at the Internet cafes. He was one of them, and he wishes that he could be sitting in front of the computer now and never get up. Like everywhere else, most customers at Internet cafes are boys, so when a girl appears, Wen takes notice. A guy in his mid-twenties walks out with a young woman. She wears an oversized zipper hoodie over close-fitting jeans, just like the girls Wen knows back home. That’s too hot for the weather, Wen thinks, but girls are always cold. Her duffle bag makes her shoulders heave at a slant and her back hump a little. The girl trails the guy. He scowls at her before straddling his scooter. As the guy drives away, the girl clutches onto the guy’s shirt until she has to let go, standing in the indifferent dust swept up behind his wheels. Undone but unfazed, she remains where she is for a while, unaware of what she is looking at or who might be looking at her.
When the girl starts walking again, Wen, keeping his distance, advances with her across the street, a lion treading after its prey. Qiang and Song An stand up from their stake-out.
◆
It’s not as easy as they thought to take the girl. The three men, novices as they are, have not agreed upon an exact plan of action. It does not occur to Wen to cover her mouth until she tries to scream, nor does Song An intuit the necessity of taking her duffel bag off before he hurls her body over his shoulder, carrying her like how he used to carry a sack of rice. Her duffel bag smashes into his face.
“Fuck, I can’t see!” Song An curses, trying to wiggle his head out from behind the bag.
Qiang rips the bag off the girl as he attempts to still her flailing limbs. Wen keeps his hand over her mouth but the choreography of their abduction is becoming impossible to maintain. The girl’s muffled yelp vibrates against his palm.
“Shut the fuck up!” Wen strikes her across the face.
She falls silent for a moment, so do the three men, and—it seems—the whole world. They get to a dark spot behind some trees and Song An sets the girl down. As soon as her feet touch the ground, she makes what sounds like the beginning of a squeal.
“Don’t you make a fucking sound!” Wen threatens.
Song An raises his arm to block Wen but it’s a second too late. Wen strikes her again. Song An watches his own hand hanging in the air and suddenly doesn’t know where to put it. They are each holding one of her arms now, keeping her in place, but the girl doesn’t need much more coercion, as if she no longer minds whose hand was on her person. Wen’s hand burns a little and it curls into a fist, he realizes it’s wet. Beside them, Qiang starts to look through her duffel bag with a flashlight. With more light, Wen sees tears trickling down the girl’s flushed face. She cries so quietly, Wen thinks. Even as he stands so close to her, he barely hears her breathe. Her meekness infuriates him in a way that confuses him: he hit her to shut her up, and now she is as silent as dead, why is he still angry? He squeezes her arm as if trying to pop a balloon.
“Qiang-brother, anything?” Song An asks.
Qiang hasn’t found anything other than neatly-folded clothes. The mere touch of her soft cotton underwear makes his fingers tingle, as though ruffling through her intimate belongings is as tantalizing as violating her flesh. He thinks of the uninhibited strokes his hands could make across his wife; the freedom she grants him makes handling her less exciting than this moment.
“You’re wasting time. There’s no money in the bag,” the girl says.
The calmness in her voice surprises the men. Wen wonders if he should hit her again. Qiang keeps going anyway. He likes it as much as he wishes he could stop, but with the two boys counting on him, he has to carry on. He finds a few pairs of bras, some t-shirts and jeans. Like she said, no money. He stands up to search her body. As he unzips her hoodie and reaches into the inside pockets, he brushes over her bare, moist skin. Under the hoodie, she wears a tank top that hugs her figure close. Qiang’s effort to avoid parts of her body that he doesn’t mean to touch is futile. He starts to move his hands lower than he intends to, discovering new spaces between her ribs. The warmth of her skin wakes up a remote but familiar feeling in him. The girl’s nipples, charged by adrenaline, stubbornly present their shape through the thin fabric of her top. The two delicate mounds on her chest are all the three men can see. Thoughts they are not willing to articulate are forming on their own. Blood is changing direction in their veins. If they had to speak, things they never thought would come out of their mouths would make themselves heard. Wen cups one of her breasts. Then Song An cups the other. Holding a woman’s breast for the first time, they don’t know what to do with it. The girl does not look at any of them. She looks through them as if they were not there, and she were not here.
If she had resisted, the men would have pushed her onto the floor and naturally piled themselves over her screams, scratches and kicks. But she does not do any of that. She’s acting off script, and the three men have no idea what’s next. Her nonchalance makes what they are doing too easy, too irrefutable to fool themselves.
“I’ll do anything you want,” the girl says coldly. “Just don’t hurt my baby.”
Qiang slides his hands over her belly and feels her small bump. He steps away from her. Wen and Song An hesitantly retrieve their hands. For a while, no one speaks.
“How old are you?” Qiang finally asks, hoping she would give him a number that’s much larger than his guess, as though that would make what they did more forgivable.
“Eighteen,” the girl says. “Next month.”
Wen and Song An glance at each other, then at Qiang. Qiang collapses into a squat, hands behind his head, burying his face in himself.
“What do you want? I’ll do anything,” the girl offers again.
Qiang stands up and says, “Let her go.”
The girl is free at last, but she is not running away. She methodically puts her clothes back into her duffel bag. The guys are paralyzed, wondering if they should be the ones running from this girl who is inexplicably unafraid.
“Where are you gonna go?” Qiang regains control of himself. “You don’t have any money on you.”
“Don’t know.” she says.
“What happened?” Qiang asks.
“What do you care?” She says, staring straight at Qiang which makes him want to cower. She catches that moment of true feeling and softens her voice. “A black-market clinic took all my money.”
She doesn’t tell them that she stole the money from her parents who had disowned her or that the regular hospitals she first went wouldn’t perform the procedure on an underage girl without the guardian’s consent. She paid an unlicensed clinic a town over, whose address she found on a telephone pole sticker that advertised painless abortions. While waiting among chipped walls and rusted chairs, she heard a woman screaming. It reminded her, strangely, of a baby’s cry. And she thought, for the first time, that perhaps she would like to hear a baby cry, her baby. She got a ruthless no for an answer when she asked for a refund. She’s also not going to tell the three men that minutes ago, her child’s father told her to fuck off and left. She won’t find out that they already know that part and are not going to pry.
“What about your parents?” says Qiang.
“I don’t have parents,” says the girl.
“I don’t have parents, either,” says Wen. The girl turns to Wen. Wen averts his eyes, remembering what he did to her.
“But my kid will have a mother. I want to go to Shanghai. I’ll find a job there and raise my kid on my own. I’ll figure it out.” When the girl talks about her kid, there’s an intimation of life in her voice.
That’s what Qiang thought three months ago, too: He would go to Shanghai, find a job, and figure it out. He didn’t. But he can’t bear ruining the girl’s precious optimism. For as long as it will last in her, he’ll believe in it, too.
“You can join us if you want, right, Qiang-brother?” Song An suggests. “We’re not real criminals. We are just doing this to get by, until we find the next job.”
“No, we can’t take a girl around,” Qiang says.
The girl says, without a beat, as if expecting such debasement, “You’ll look less suspicious with a girl. I can be useful.”
“She’s right, Qiang-brother,” Wen says.
“The girl is smart,” Song An says.
“Smart girls don’t get pregnant like me,” she sneers.
She likes sex. She likes the power she has over men who wants her body and she’s young enough to believe that that kind of power lasts. She slept with a few boys in her school before she met the child’s father, nine years older. She let him do anything he wanted and took pleasure in his satisfaction. She let him not wear a condom once, then twice, then always. She let him finish inside her. She let him yell “get a fucking abortion” in her face. His spit shot into her eyes and she had to squint. She’s punished for her desires. No, she’s blessed, isn’t she? She’ll always have someone from now on, a child who will be hers to the end of time, a false idea she will rectify when the time comes.
“Let me come with you,” she pleads.
Qiang agrees.
“What’s your name?” Song An asks.
“Shan-Shan, ‘shan’ as in ‘shining light’,” she says.
People often mistake the character in her name to be the exquisitely feminine character common for girls, which has led her to a habit of explaining it preemptively. It’s not her real name; she gave it to herself.
The guys, almost timidly, say their names without Shan-Shan’s asking. Their names are so commonplace that the meaning of the characters no longer register for most people. But Shan-Shan hears them in their original signification: Qiang—strong, Wen—erudite, An—peace.
“Where should we go?” Wen asks.
“Anywhere. I’m never coming back to this godforsaken town,” Shan-Shan says.
Shan-Shan doesn’t yet know herself. Three years from now, when her mother offers to take care of her daughter, she, having forgiven everything, will happily oblige, so that she will be able to quit her job at the hair salon, washing people’s hair until her fingertips puff and bleed, and take the job at the bakery that smells like happiness. Then her mother will start to ask her to send money every month for child support, and she won’t discover until years later that only a fraction of her money will be spent on her daughter; most of it will add to the fund that her parents are saving to buy an apartment for her younger brother. At the bakery, she will meet a nice boy. The boy’s family will oppose their union because she has an illicit child. When she hears the word “illicit”, she will miss her daughter dearly. She will move back to the same godforsaken town, determined to watch her daughter grow.
“None of us wants to come back here again,” Qiang says. “Come on, we need to hurry. It’ll be light soon.”
◆
It’s always darkest before dawn, Song An often says to himself. He appreciates the proverb’s good intention, finding solace in its declarative lucidity when life is unrelentingly messy and grim. Today, as he walks with three strangers, who are the closest thing to friends he has, he realizes a fundamental truth: the darkness before the dawn is not the darkest at all. While they have been talking, the first light of dawn appears below the horizon and in the same instant, darkness ends without lingering. Another day is beginning, and Song An is not sure if he’s ready for it. For years, Song An will feel this trepidation as a new day starts. He’ll work different jobs that require him to be awake at this hour: delivery person, security guard, hotel kitchen staff. He’ll go through the same dread of launching into another day only to exhaust himself past the night. Sometimes he’ll think of Qiang and Wen and wonder if they will have found a better way to make a living or if they will also be pushing through days and nights like a blind person trying to cross a river. He’ll regret not asking Shan-Shan to stay with him; she will remain the most special girl he will ever meet. But knowing that these friends will be out in the world, each on their own, gives him enough hope to make it through day after day.
At the end of the block, steam oozes out from a storefront. As they get closer, the enchanting smell of flour, almost sweet, seduces Wen’s empty stomach. He sees the tower of bamboo steaming trays, and at the conjuring of pork baozi, saliva accumulates under his tongue.
“Hey, do you think we can get some breakfast first?” Wen addresses the question to the group. But really, he’s asking Song An.
Song An hesitates, though it’s nice of Wen to ask considering the little money he has was almost Wen’s. Before he comes up with an awkward answer, Shan-Shan saves him.
“The breakfast place on the corner? We can also just eat and…run.”
“I’m starving,” says Wen.
“Me too,” says Shan-Shan.
“We could eat first and… raid the register,” Wen hears himself say.
Wen will forever remember this feeling of hunger and how it puts thoughts in his head. This particular memory is the one Wen will come back to time and again, long after he spends seven years in prison for attempted armed robbery of an upscale jewelry shop in a much bigger city: his belly growling, his legs weak, his hands clammy, and the evil desire of survival whispering in his ear. It will take Wen the rest of his life to unlatch himself from the person who is reborn in front of the breakfast place on the corner, who will keep telling himself that he is only taking back what he rightfully deserves, that it is only a one-time thing, that when he gets enough, he will turn his life around.
The four of them walk toward the open door, their footsteps tapping in an impatient cadence.
◆
“I’m not open yet!” The boss-auntie shouts friendly without pausing the folding of wontons, as Qiang, Wen, Song An walk through the door.
“Can we eat?” Shan-Shan puts on her good girl voice.
The boss-auntie looks up to see Shan-Shan, her hoodie unzipped, her hands casually framing her baby bump. She stops the work of her fingers.
“Okay, sit,” the boss-auntie says. “What are you eating?”
“Four trays of baozi,” Wen says, earnestly, as the four of them sit down at a table. “Give us five, will you? What congee do you have?”
“Only millet right now. The rest is not done yet.”
“Four bowls of millet congee then.”
Their order spreads on the table in a blink, and the four of them start gorging on the baozi like they are trying to choke themselves. The congee is too hot, but they gulp it, leaving a burn down their esophagus. After the birth of his son and daughter and failing in a few more cities, Qiang, in his late thirties, will move back to his hometown and open a breakfast place. First, he will run it out of a mobile stove on a tricycle, making only the local breakfast soup; eventually he will save enough to rent a small storefront like this one he is sitting in right now, offering the full breakfast fare—baozi, congee, tea eggs, tofu flower, wonton soup, breakfast noodles, fried dough sticks. Qiang will work with his wife, who will have long hair again, but he will no longer find it beautiful. Watching people eat his food is what he will enjoy the most, remembering how he felt years ago in Kunshan. In the afternoon, when his day is over and his wife is busy with the kids, he will, sometimes, type fragments of words and sentences on his phone. He will never have finished high school and not know the first thing about poetry, but if he reads some of his words together, it will stir a tender feeling inside him. Ashamed of his unmanliness, he will not tell anyone about this.
“For goodness’ sake, slow down! Aren’t you a hungry bunch.” The boss-auntie says, laughing. She returns to her work table. “What’s the hurry? It’s early. Plenty time left in the day.”
Nobody says a word. Their mouths are preoccupied with chewing and swallowing, and their minds something else. Wen steals glances at the boss-auntie. Stuffed in the pocket of her apron is a stack of cash. He can tell that someone has taken care to flatten, one by one, the darkened and crumpled bills. On the same table where the boss-auntie places rows of wontons, a shoebox lies against the wall. It would be easy-peasy to get both the cash and the shoebox, Wen thinks. Following Wen’s eyes, Song An sees the shoebox, too. He tries not to surmise what the boss-auntie will feel when it is taken from her.
“Keep eating,” Qiang says, looking at Wen and Song An, though none of them has stopped.
“Your baozi is delicious, auntie!” Shan-Shan says with a stuffed mouth, smiling at the boss-auntie, who is coming out from behind the table.
“Not to brag, but I make the best baozi in town! Here, try my chicken soup wontons, too. It’s my son’s favorite,” the boss-auntie turns up with four bowls of wonton soup. She lays a bowl before each of them. They all look at her, unsure.
“Eat, no worry, eat, it’s on me.” The boss-auntie taps her chest. She stands by them and waits for them to start on the wontons. “You all are too skinny-looking! Need to eat more, especially you,” she points at Shan-Shan. “My son is twenty-six this year and he’s skinny just like you all. He’s been working in Beijing for three years. Every time he comes home he looks skinnier. You young people are working too hard these days.”
She looks at Wen and Song An. “How old are you two? You look even younger than my son. You must be growing still! And you?” She rests her hand on Qiang’s shoulder, “You’re about my son’s age, no?”
Qiang nods, harder than he means to.
“Thank you, auntie,” Shan-Shan says, not looking up from her bowl.
“Don’t mention it. When I see hardworking young people, I think of my son. Can’t help it,” the boss-auntie says with a bittersweet smile. “Okay, you keep eating. I gotta keep making these wontons. The town is waking up in a minute.”
The boss-auntie makes her way back behind her work table, gathers the filling with chopsticks, and folds the skin into a perfect wonton. She puts another piece of wonton skin in her palm and does the same over and over.
Qiang, Wen, Song An, and Shan-Shan hide their faces behind their raised bowls, slurping the end of the chicken soup. They don’t want the others to see what their face look like at the mercy of such unbearable kindness. The smell of sweet porridge mixes with the savory chicken soup in the air. Outside, the first light has exaggerated into a rosy morning glow. Birds are chirping up a symphony over electric wires. The world seems just perfect if they would let it last.
Softly, the boss-auntie starts humming a cheerful tune, popular before the four of them were born. Then, abruptly, she stops, as if forgetting something important. She turns to her customers and shouts in her friendly way, “Kids, how’s the soup? Want anything else?”